Create React App vs Webpack

Overview

Webpack

Stacks45.0K

Followers28.1K

Votes752

GitHub Stars65.7K

Forks9.2K

Create React App

Stacks1.0K

Followers1.0K

Votes4

Create React App vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Webpack: Webpack is a popular module bundler that allows developers to bundle different modules and static assets into a single file. It is highly configurable and provides a lot of flexibility in terms of how the code is processed and dependencies are resolved. Webpack has a steeper learning curve compared to Create React App.
Create React App: Create React App is a command-line tool that sets up a new React project with a basic configuration, including webpack, Babel, and a development server. It provides a simple and streamlined way to start a new React project without having to worry about configuring webpack. Create React App abstracts away many of the complexities of webpack and makes it easier for beginners to get started with React development.
Configuration: Webpack requires manual configuration for each project and provides a lot of options to customize the build process. Create React App, on the other hand, hides the webpack configuration and provides a predefined configuration that works out of the box for most projects. This means that developers using Create React App don't have to spend time configuring webpack and can focus more on building their React application.
Plugins and Loaders: Webpack allows developers to use various plugins and loaders to handle different types of files and perform different tasks during the bundling process. Create React App abstracts away the need for manually configuring plugins and loaders. It comes with a predefined set of plugins and loaders that cover most common use cases, making it easier for developers to get started without having to worry about configuring and installing additional dependencies.
Hot Module Replacement: Webpack supports hot module replacement (HMR), which allows developers to see the changes in their code instantly without having to manually refresh the browser. Create React App also supports HMR out of the box, making it easier for developers to see the changes in their React components in real-time while they are developing.
Development and Production Builds: Webpack requires developers to configure separate webpack configurations for development and production builds. Create React App simplifies this process by providing a single configuration that is optimized for production builds. It automatically generates the optimized and minified production build when the project is ready to be deployed.

In Summary, Webpack provides more flexibility and customization options but requires manual configuration, while Create React App abstracts away the complexities of webpack and provides a simple and streamlined way to start a new React project.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Webpack, Create React App

Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Decided

Why migrated?

I could define the next points why we have to migrate:

Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
Also jspm install takes much more time than npm install.
Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.

301k views301k

Comments

Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.

224k views224k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Webpack	Create React App
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.	Create React apps with no build configuration.
Bundles ES Modules, CommonJS, and AMD modules (even combined); Can create a single bundle or multiple chunks that are asynchronously loaded at runtime (to reduce initial loading time); Dependencies are resolved during compilation, reducing the runtime size; Loaders can preprocess files while compiling, e.g. TypeScript to JavaScript, Handlebars strings to compiled functions, images to Base64, etc; Highly modular plugin system to do whatever else your application requires	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 65.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 9.2K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 45.0K	Stacks 1.0K
Followers 28.1K	Followers 1.0K
Votes 752	Votes 4
Pros & Cons
Pros 309 Most powerful bundler 182 Built-in dev server with livereload 142 Can handle all types of assets 87 Easy configuration 22 Laravel-mix Cons 15 Hard to configure 5 No clear direction 2 SystemJS integration is quite lackluster 2 Spaghetti-Code out of the box 2 Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers	Pros 2 No config, easy to use 2 Maintained by React core team Cons 1 No SSR
Integrations
JavaScript	React

What are some alternatives to Webpack, Create React App?

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

React

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

gulp

Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Grunt

The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free and open source JavaScript platform for building mobile apps and desktop experiences. What makes Famo.us unique is its JavaScript rendering engine and 3D physics engine that gives developers the power and tools to build native quality apps and animations using pure JavaScript.

Related Comparisons

Create React App vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Webpack: Webpack is a popular module bundler that allows developers to bundle different modules and static assets into a single file. It is highly configurable and provides a lot of flexibility in terms of how the code is processed and dependencies are resolved. Webpack has a steeper learning curve compared to Create React App.
Create React App: Create React App is a command-line tool that sets up a new React project with a basic configuration, including webpack, Babel, and a development server. It provides a simple and streamlined way to start a new React project without having to worry about configuring webpack. Create React App abstracts away many of the complexities of webpack and makes it easier for beginners to get started with React development.
Configuration: Webpack requires manual configuration for each project and provides a lot of options to customize the build process. Create React App, on the other hand, hides the webpack configuration and provides a predefined configuration that works out of the box for most projects. This means that developers using Create React App don't have to spend time configuring webpack and can focus more on building their React application.
Plugins and Loaders: Webpack allows developers to use various plugins and loaders to handle different types of files and perform different tasks during the bundling process. Create React App abstracts away the need for manually configuring plugins and loaders. It comes with a predefined set of plugins and loaders that cover most common use cases, making it easier for developers to get started without having to worry about configuring and installing additional dependencies.
Hot Module Replacement: Webpack supports hot module replacement (HMR), which allows developers to see the changes in their code instantly without having to manually refresh the browser. Create React App also supports HMR out of the box, making it easier for developers to see the changes in their React components in real-time while they are developing.
Development and Production Builds: Webpack requires developers to configure separate webpack configurations for development and production builds. Create React App simplifies this process by providing a single configuration that is optimized for production builds. It automatically generates the optimized and minified production build when the project is ready to be deployed.

Create React App vs Webpack

Overview